Again the gurgling. When he heard it, it was combustible, the wet gurgling of a stalled pipe, a backwash, a flooded engine. Too loud.
He sat down on the couch, eyes fixed on the short staircase and the figure that made its way down it.
His phone rang and he knew it was Miranda before he even looked at it.
Craig slowly seeped down the staircase, on all fours, his spine an elevated domed point. He leaned gauntly on his side, in obvious distress. The distortions of his musculature were such that his head dragged forward and his front limbs had trouble even making constant contact with the ground; his back, arched up as it was, made him resemble a pinioned marionette.
“Craig?” Miles mouthed, nothing coming out. “Craig,” he repeated, this time sotto voiced, and gasped to himself at recognizing his own voice, for it was his voice and this was real and actually happening.
“Craig, baby, baby? My baby?”
He answered the vibrating phone and brought it to his ear and said nothing, mouth agape.
Craig, with his unknowing face, looked up at his father. His unknowing face of pestilent, congealed sores, his mouth suppurating cruelly, his eyes voiding of life. His spit-up added an almost laminating bright sheen to the crusting, curdled ooze around his mouth. He crawled on his side like a wounded animal. He reached out and tumbled and something about the severity of the fall reignited the traditional fear centers that Miles recognized, the panic of a fallen child.
Miles ran and hovered over Craig, not sure how to grab him, not sure how to scoop him up and drive him to his bosom, to protect him.
He listened to his wife’s hysterical yelling through the phone.
“He’s mutating, he’s mutating, Dear God, I didn’t know what to do, I panicked. I ran. I’m sorry.
“I’m dying. I ran, I didn’t know what to do. I’m dying. My, my privates … my private area, it’s dissolving. It … hurts so badly. It’s … dissolving. Please, what is going on, help us! Help us! The back of my head, where you kissed me last night, it hurts so much, it’s like, it’s like someone hammered the back of my head. I’m … I’m in agony. I’m dying … . “
He was not meant for this world, and this is what his indecision, his vacillation, his fear to take the plunge had resulted in. He was toxic. He’d known it all his life. It was time to be done with it, to do what the world had been telling him to do for as long as he’d been cognizant enough to recognize it.
He didn’t hate himself, honestly. He was a good person.
He just didn’t fit. He just didn’t fit within the contours of the world. He was defective. He’d known it his whole life, every fiber and feeling within his being had told him so, but he’d let the cult of positive thinking delude him otherwise, pretend that the traditional flow of life was something he could take part in.
He took out the sharpest knife in the drawer and tore out his throat, baptized, rectified, stretching out in contrition for his failures, praying to whomever placed him in this world to take pity on him, for existence had not been his fault.
With a Voice that is Often Still Confused But is Becoming Ever Louder and Clearer Page 32